News from Nowhere

I have admitted before that although we are apending our evenings in front of the television, mostly we are not watching the much-praised dramas (unless they are based on the work of Ann Cleeves). We watch a lot of Pointless with Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman; we dip into Richard Osman's House of Games; and we have just watched the three installments of Alexander Armstrong's trip to Iceland. You will think that I am obsessed with these two presenters, and I will reply that no, it is the television which is obsessed with them.

My true obsession, and the reason I am posting about this, appears in that film about Iceland, in which Xander visits Heimaey:



Speed through to about 25 minutes in, just after the break, for the visit to the wildlife rescue center, and the puffins - Including the briefest blink-and-you've-missed-it film of puffins zipping about in the water.

Then they cut away to fuss over the Beluga whales. Some people have no taste.

In accordance with the rule that you wait hours for a bus and then three come along together, we have failed to watch all the big TV dramas, but are dividing this weekend between three northern crime series. Two of them spin off from the novels of Ann Cleeves, who is both friend and client, and it is one of the vagaries of scheduling (rival channels, so it can't be collusion) that they are both running on TV at the same time.

Vera is the least northern of the three: it's set in Northumberland, but strays into neighbouring counties, and location-spotting is not the least of its pleasures. It's the least noir, too. The convention appears to be that crime fiction is divided into 'noir' and 'cosy', and cosy is inferior in both literary and moral terms, treating murder as an entertainment and avoiding the grim realities of life. The crimes Vera solves are personal, domestic in scale. They show violence - and the pressures that provoke the violence - breaking into the sort of life lived by the majority of her viewers / readers: I don't see what's so cosy about that (and the first story ended with something genuinely shocking and unexpected, so don't let me overstate this 'cosiness'). One episode of the four in the current series was based on the latest Vera Stanhope book (The Moth Catcher), the others are original stories, but retain the flavour of the books. Much as I like the books, they suffer from being cut down to fit into however long remains of two hours when you have subtracted the interminable advertising breaks; perhaps I prefer to original stories because I don't have the novel to compare them to. Vera has been an agreeable way to spend Sunday evenings, and I'll be sorry to say goodbye to her tomorrow.

Shetland is made by the same company as Vera, but they have made some very different choices. Given six one hour slots, they have opted to tell a single continuing story, and that story is harsher and more violent. It's probably obvious from the previous paragraph that my own tastes in crime fiction tend towards the so-called cosy; I am more interested in exploring why an ordinary person might commit murder than in contemplating the actions of people whose wickedness is sufficient to explain whatever they might do. If you want me to stay interested when the investigation moves to Glasgow and the Mr Big of gangland, you have to work twice as hard to make me interested. This series of Shetland has achieved that, by keeping the focus not on the hard men but on the effects of their activities. (Here's what Ann had to say about this, though if you are watching the series you may not want to read it before you have seen episode five). There's enough suggestion that the dénouement will bring it all back home to Shetland to make me impatient for the final episode: a two week wait, thank you BBC schedulers!

Further north and more noir yet, we have just watched the first part of Trapped: which begins with a headless, limbless torso being fished out of an Icelandic fjord (later we get a good look at it). As in The Bridge, there's an international complication: the body may have come from the ferry which has just docked, and the captain insists that he is subject to Danish law. It's a curious mixture of grand guignol and officialdom. The scenery - before the weather imposes a white-out - is spectacular. In an extraordinary piece of negative product placement, the ferry, with its probable crime scene, obstructive captain and other suspicious characters is - as it is in real life on this route - the Norrona, which has been on my wish-list since the long ago days when it used to call at Lerwick on its way from Denmark to the Faroe Islands.

That evening brought us to the end of our road across the north of Iceland; the next morning we turned south. We were staying on a horse farm, outside the town of Hvammstangi, and just had time for a quick stroll round. The Seal Centre had closed, but the handicraft shop was still open - this is where durham_rambler brought the big brown jumper. I was very taken with the many corrugated iron houses, painted in a rainbow of bright colours (more pictures of Hvammstangi).

The next day, driving south and west, we realised that summer had been advancing while we were in the north; the meadowsweet was in bloom, and the fields were dotted with bales of straw, all neatly wrapped in plastic, One farm had apparently held an event for children, because each bale in the field had been decorated on the end towards the road, with scenes and 'welcome' messages and silly faces.

That's where my notes run out; next stop, Snæfellsnes.

Saturday's travel supplement includes a description of an Icelandic road trip, a drive around Route 1, which is pretty much what we did. Like us, Amelia Hill travelled with Discover the World, though she road-tested a package called 'Natural Iceland Farmstays' which won't go on sale until this summer (though there's no indication that she wasn't paying her own way). It sounds as if it needed a little road-testing, too: I detected a certain edge to her handling of Discover the World's claim to have "hand-picked a charming selection of rural accommodation..." and to the long hours' driving necessitated by their itinerary - and I don't think this is just because that was how we felt.

It's almost a year since I last wrote about our trip to Iceland; all that time we've been about to arrive at out hotel on Lake Mývatn. Discover the World had urged us to spend three nights there, to give ourselves two full days exploring Mývatn. We weren't convinced: our itinerary didn't give us very long anywhere, and we were trying to squeeze in as much as we could; besides, we'd heard about the midges. As it turned out, our hotel by the lake, while perfectly OK, wasn't particularly exciting (and I note that the farm-stay holiday takes you to the farm at Vogafjós where we lunched, and thought would be a good place to stay).



We packed our one day by Lake Mývatn full to bursting, though. We may have been lucky with the midges: we met nothing to compare with, say, the clouds of little black flies which are such an affliction on a bad day in Kielder Forest - though, inevitably, I managed to swallow one. For much of the day we weren't walking by the lake at all, but exploring the various manifestations of volcanic activity in the surrounding hillsides. But we did start our day with a short stroll among the pseudocraters immediately across the road from our hotel: 'pseudo' because although these smooth sided hillocks and circular lakes look like volcanic craters, they are actually formed in the molten lava by escaping steam.

Then on to Dimmuborgir (pausing only to admire some lava stacks by the waterside). This is a labyrinth of jagged lava formations, all pinnacles and arches and twisted shapes on which tradition or the local tourist office has exercised its imagination, seeing palaces and cathedrals in a three-dimensional Rorschach test. There's a signposted path, and by the time we had completed it, we were ready for a break.

Lunch, as I said, was at Vogafjós, and after lunch we went to the Earth Baths, the Jarðbödin thermal pool. I'd built up quite a resistance to the Blue Lagoon, the big thermal baths near the airport - it was so heavily advertised, and felt so commercial, not to mention expensive. But we couldn't very well leave Iceland withouut having swum in a thermal pool, so we opted for this lower key option, and I, at least, enjoyed it much more than I'd expected to.



I'd been thinking of it as a rather peculiar sort of swimming pool, but of course it's much more like a bath that's big enough to swim in (and when we were there, only a fraction of the area was open; beyond the enclosed pool is a whole lake, to which we didn't have access). The water is warm, and opaque, and sulphurous, and slippery to the touch. The ground beneath your feet - which you can't see - is uneven, but as smooth as if it has been polished, so there is no choice but to slow down, and move with great caution, and every now and then just drape yourself over a rock and watch the world go by.

It was extraordinarily relaxing, but we thought we could still manage a little drive, up into the Krafla volcanic area: past a field of steaming, bubbling sulphurous mud and up the mountain with increasing trepidation towards the plant where the volcano is tapped for energy.

Last week's Guardian review has an interesting article on William Morris in Iceland (illustrated with a lovely photograph of Jökulsárlón, which I don't think he visited). Fiona MacCarthy argues that the trip to Iceland influenced Morris's political thinking.

Recording our own trip to Iceland, the next stop was Húsavík, whale-watching capital and home of the Phallological Museum. durham_rambler had been adamant that he didn't want to visit this, so we hadn't scheduled a visit; now, as we drove into town at five to five, he was suddenly interested: "Isn't this where - oh, look! there it is!" By the time we'd managed to park (in the carpark of a supermarket where I was delighted to see, propped against a wall, a giant stencil presumably used to mark out disabled parking spaces) it was closed. Next time, then - and I liked the look of Húsavík, so that'll be fine.

Meanwhile, we had to move on to our destination: we were to spend the next couple of nights by Lake Mývatn.

Our walk over the hills to Brúnavík marked another turning point in our Icelandic circuit: we had travelled east along the south coast as far as Höfn, then turned north up the east coast. Now we rejoined route 1 and headed west, further inland. 'Inland' is a relative term: we had read the descriptions of driving on unmetalled tracks in Iceland's interior, and decided we could live without it. So we didn't hire a four wheel drive car, and were now legally prohibited from changing our minds. We didn't regret it...

Route 1 snaked across great expanses of bare earth. Our guidebook recommended the detour to Möðrudalur, and since it sounded like a pleasant lunch stop, we turned down route 901. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't this:



The web site describes Möðrudalur as the highest farm in Iceland, at 469 metres - a picturesque traditional settlement, for values of 'traditional' in the paradoxical Icelandic style: on the one hand it traces its origins back to the settlement of Iceland, on the other the church is dated 1949. The triple-roofed building in the picture may look like a turf farm, but is actually the filling station.

I felt as if I had wandered into a museum stocked with careful reconstructions; but the café had the atmosphere of one of those remote pubs where everyone stops because where else is there to go? It was Beamish crossed with the Tan Hill Inn.

It isn't spring - of course it isn't spring, it isn't necessarily even the thaw. But it's certainly a thaw, and I've been thinking about where all the water will go when it thaws up Weardale, and remembering the waterfalls of Iceland, and how counter-intuitive it seemed at the time that the waterfalls were at their height in the summer. Here I expect the rivers to be low in winter, but in Iceland that's when they fill with meltwater - ah, suddenly this makes sense.

Where did I read that waterfalls are a feature of a young landscape, that with time tthe river wears its valley down to a level? I don't remember, but this too makes sense: throughout our stay in Iceland we were encouraged to stop and admire waterfalls (Wikipedia has a list). I said, when I wrote about our tour of the 'Golden Circle' of popular tourist sites (on which we diverted from the main toute to see Faxafoss on the way to Gullfoss) that these were spectacular, beautiful waterfalls, but that neither of them was my favourite.

Mostly, I don't care for this habit of arranging everything into lists of the 'top 10'. But I felt at the time that I was being plied with superlatives, that every waterfall was the most something: the most beautiful, or the most powerful - Dettifoss is the most powerful waterfall in Europe, in the sense that it has the greatest throughput of water, in other words, it is the wettest waterfall (also the greyest, but that's less of an attraction. Svartifoss has the finest black basalt columns, and was certainly one of my favourites.

But there's nothing quite like having a waterfall to yourself, without the coachloads of tourists - very well, other tourists. Since we were staying the night in Skógafoss, we were able to stroll up to the waterfall in the evening, and enjoy the scenery in peace, and remark how the abundance of spray had carpeted the cliffs with lush green moss, and charmed rainbows out of the evening sun.

Later, in the east, driving towards Egilsstaðir - the coast is so deeply cut with fjords that we were constantly driving from one direction or another towards Egilsstaðir, and never actually visited the town - following the river valley down from the pass, as the water tumbled down a series of cascades, we seized the opportunity to pull of the road and take the little path a hundred yards or so to the falls.



For once, I don't think it scored any superlatives: we'd seen bigger falls, and more spectacular ones. But this was the only one we had completely to ourselves, and the water fell cleanly over the lip of the cliff, and there was a grassy path and wild flowers along the way. I don't even know its name, but this stays with me as my favourite of all the waterfalls we saw in Iceland.

durham_rambler has sent me a link to a BBC feature about the puffling rescue system in the Westman Islands. This is old news, but still, pufflings! (The film makes it look very dark in the islands - in August?)

If you'd prefer the audio version, the BL sells a CD of puffin noises (with a 41 second sample, which is probably as much as I need). D., who forwarded on the link, points out that the headline is "Coastal Birds Download on British Library
Coastal Birds Download", but that he was unable to download a puffin - well, it's the wrong time of year, obviously.

It was at Vik that I finally began to digest the fact that just because it's shown in the road atlas, that doesn't mean it's a town - or not anything we'd recognise as a town anyway.

Iceland has a population of around 300,00, of whom 115,000 live in Reykjavik. The towns we had seen so far were Keflavík/Njarðvík, near the airport, and the market-gardening centre of Hveragerði - small towns, but equipped with supermarkets, shopping precincts, streets, all the elements that I take for granted when I think of towns. And that's pretty much what I was expecting to find at Vik. The guide book called it a town, and said that unusually for a coastal town, it had no port; also that the older part of the town is on the coastal plain, but that the new buildings are higher up the slopes, and that this is because when Katla erupted in 1918 the plain was flooded, and so much debris was (many? were?) washed down that the coast was extended by 500 yards (as we were saying, geology just keeps on happening; I am disconcerted by the matter-of-fact way Icelanders deal with this).

So, after a happy morning playing on the black beach, we drove into Vik looking for lunch, parked round the side of the petrol station, where we noticed that there was a shop and a café, and strolled off to see what the other options were.

There weren't any. This was it.

There was a school, and a church perched high up above the town. There was a post office. There was a small housing estate, with a path down to the water, where there was a sculpture called 'For' looking across the sea to its twin in Kingston upon Hull. There were a couple of industrial units, a gifts and crafts shop, and the garage we'd already noticed. If there was anything else, we didn't see it.

This isn't a complaint. We ate at the café: durham_rambler had the soup, and I had fish and chips, which were served with pink sauce of the sort prawn cocktail used to be served in, back in the 1970s when we still ate prawn cocktail. The fish was lovely and fresh, and perfectly cooked. The craft shop was probably the best of the entire trip: the knitwear department was upstairs, and you could look down into the workshop and watch the knitters. I bought a waistcoat, and eventually decided against a poncho (though I see it's still available on their web site).

I liked Vik, it was an entirely satisfactory lunch stop; but it wasn't what I had been expecting - at it was the point at which I began to recalibrate my expectations.

I bought this Icelandic cookbook at the Þingvellir visitor centre; cookbooks are one of my favourite kinds of holiday souvenir, and besides, it has a glossary at the back. (Admittedly, this didn't stop me, later on, ordering the 'mackerel runner carpaccio' under the impression that it was - well, mackerel. It wasn't until after I'd eaten it - it was very thin slices of frozen fish, which melted fishily on the tongue, and quite delicious - that they told me a mackerel runner was a kind of shark.)

The book is designed for visitors to Iceland -

Oh, maybe the fact that it's in French makes that a little obvious. In fact it's a translation from the German, but even so -

Well then, it's a slightly curious mixture. It's very attractively produced, in a slightly advertising design sort of way - by which I mean, I suppose, that the illustrations are decorative rather than informative: the photograph on page 88, for example, beneath a recipe for mashed swede, appears to show someone feeding a cassette tape into a hot spring. The introductory text is entitled 'Cooking with the four elements' but assembles some solid information under this elevated rubic - and ends by listing, in order to demonstrate how people typically eat, the lunch menus served over two weeks at the agricultural college in Hólar.

The recipes are similarly concerned with what people actually eat, rather than with fancy restaurant deconstructions of traditional dishes. Some of them are rather daunting - and no, by this I don't mean the notorious rotten shark, but for example the pink 'cocktail' sauce used as a salad dressing and served with chips: its ingredients are mayonnaise, sour cream, ketchup, pineapple syrup (from the tinned fruit, I think), sherry, paprika and seasonings. A curried rollmop salad contains mango chutney and a banana as well as pickled herrings. This confirms that on the one hand, Icelanders do have a sweet tooth, as well as being heavy handed with the salt, and on the other hand that the banana has a special place in the national cuisine. Snickers and banana tart?

There are some usable recipes, especially for fish, but the main interest for me was in the more traditional dishes. I don't suppose I shall ever want to cook a guillemot, but it's good to know that if I do, I have the recipe (the trick seems to be to soak them in milk to remove as much as possible of the flavour of guillemot, and then to lard them liberally with bacon to conceal the rest. And add redcurrant jelly to the sauce).

There's also a recipe for the traditional rye bread - otherwise known as 'that dark, sweet cake that tastes a bit like parkin, provided you don't put ginger in your parkin' (frequently served with smoked salmon). It's simple to make, say the instructions, but the key point is that it has to be baked very slowly for 24 hours in a closed container. The traditional utensil for this is known as a makkintossdós - a Quality Street tin.

There is a web site for the German edition of the book; the French edition invites you to visit www.turi.is/cuisiner-islandais, which leads to one of the best "we are going to put a web site here when we get round to it" pages I have ever seen: a blank page with the single line of text: ( no, not even - just four characters: )